Focus is on improving, not just assessing, reading skills

Lafayette's Anne Beninghof, an education consultant, was coaching teachers at a Thornton elementary school who were struggling to assess the comprehension of students reading independently.

Barb Kalisch, who retired from Tarver Elementary at the end of the school year, said she was asking students to draw pictures or answer questions on sticky notes as they read -- but it took too much time to organize and read them. So Beninghof suggested paper bookmarks that correlated to a specific comprehension topic, such as character development.

Those worked better, but were still cumbersome. So a year-and-a-half ago, Beninghof began working on an iPad app that would be similar to the paper bookmarks, but more user friendly for the teacher.

"What most other reading comprehension apps do is assess a student's reading comprehension abilities," she said. A child reads a text and answers questions. My app improves reading comprehension skills, instead of just assessing them."

Apple recently accepted and released her Reading Comprehension Booster app. In creating the app, she came up with the content and design, while Boulder's John Stump handled the technological aspects.

The app has seven bookmarks that students can open while they read, with prompts that engage them to reflect on characters, setting, sequence of events, making predictions, making connections between the text and themselves and the main idea and supporting details. The seventh bookmark allows students to jot down ideas for their own stories.

Beninghof said teachers wanted a way to capture the data that students were generating, so she added a feature that allows a student to email what they recorded to a teacher or parent. To make it accessible to younger students and those with special needs, she designed it so that students can write, say or draw a response.

Kalisch, who helped Beninghof test the app, called it "absolutely incredible."

"It encourages them to stop and think about what they're reading, to digest it," she said.

Debbie Haseman, who teaches first grade at Broomfield's Birch Elementary, is planning to try the app with her students in the fall. She said she likes that it's accessible to young students still learning to write and isn't just "an electronic worksheet."

"It's designed to help students think about what they're reading," she said. "It really is a comprehension support. I'm excited to see how it works."

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